Michael Van Valkenburgh visits the site of Maggie Daley Park, where he served as the landscape architect, in 2014. Van Valkenburgh is now designing the 20-acre campus for the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park.

Michael Van Valkenburgh visits the site of Maggie Daley Park, where he served as the landscape architect, in 2014. Van Valkenburgh is now designing the 20-acre campus for the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park. (Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune)

Though plans for the Obama Presidential Center still call for the controversial closing of Cornell Drive, a six-lane artery that cuts through Jackson Park, the absence of a road from 57th Street south to 67th Street would make room for a performance lawn along the park's lagoons, a playground resembling a ropes course and a steep sledding hill for Chicago winters, according to the landscape architect designing the 20-acre campus in the middle of the historic South Side park.

Area commuters rely on Cornell to zoom between South Lake Shore Drive and the Chicago Skyway. But in an interview with the Tribune, Michael Van Valkenburgh, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based landscape architect whose firm designed The 606, Chicago's signature rails-to-trails project, and Maggie Daley Park, Chicago's 20-acre lakefront playground, said early studies indicate synchronizing traffic lights on surrounding streets would result in "as close to a net zero change on commuting time as is possible."

A spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation said the city supports the Obama Foundation's proposal, but it will take more than synchronization to relieve any resulting traffic congestion. No road closures or measures for mitigating the impact of closing Cornell have been finalized, he added.

"Cornell was never envisioned obviously by the Olmsted plans to be such an aggressive divider of access," Van Valkenburgh said, referring to one of the park's original designers, Frederick Law Olmsted. "A multilane highway literally severs a sense of connection along the west side of the park. We're putting that back and making the transition seamless between the presidential center and the rest of the park."

The Obama Foundation, the nonprofit charged with building the presidential center, and the Chicago Department of Transportation will discuss landscape design, traffic and other proposed plans for Jackson Park at 6 p.m. Wednesday during a public meeting at the South Shore Cultural Center. It is the first of three public meetings organized by the city and Park District, and for some neighbors, a long overdue invitation to offer input.

"We have serious concerns about accountability to the community," said Juanita Irizarry, executive director of Friends of the Park. "We are excited to know that the Obamas care about citizen engagement and think it's important that this planning process reflect that. ... We hope it's robust and real."

Van Valkenburgh said his plans for the area surrounding the Obama center aim to add modern amenities to the tranquil oasis for city dwellers that Olmsted and Calvert Vaux envisioned for the 543-acre South Side park 120 years ago.

"It's an opportunity to restore some of the vision of the Olmsted plans, all the while moving into the 21st century," he said. "And understanding what the neighborhood wants to have is part of the process."

Because of the park's size and scale, it offers a range of options regardless of whether neighbors prefer a tranquil nature sanctuary, an amusement park, a neighborhood hangout or a tourist destination, he said. It also offers maturity. Instead of saplings, giant trees and plants plucked from the periphery of Chicago have been there for more than a century, making it easier to picture what Olmstead and Vaux had in mind.

Many of the entertainment features mirror a previous Park District plan, drawn up in 2013 with Project 120 Chicago, a nonprofit that has helped shape a number of projects, including a proposed visitors pavilion and outdoor amphitheater in Jackson Park.

The design for the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park was unveiled May 3, 2017.

Drawings also show landscaping above a proposed underground garage planned for the eastern end of the Midway Plaisance, with a pedestrian bridge connecting it to the Metra stations. Irizarry said because that particular piece of land belongs to the city and the Obama Foundation has said it will not cover the cost of the construction, she questions whether taxpayers will pay for that garage and how transparent the city will be about the process.

The Obama Foundation said many of the designs, such as parking, are conceptual, while others are further along in their planning.

In addition to entertainment features, the Obama center also plans to offer wooded walking areas and educational components such as community gardens, Van Valkenburgh said.

"We like the idea that youth groups or maybe even school groups can compete and are assigned an opportunity to come and grow gardens at the presidential center," he said. "That is part of this larger idea that the president and Mrs. Obama have of the center giving back to the neighborhood."

That approach to community gardening would differ from the typical model across the city where gardeners own their plots and can tend to them at their leisure. Whether residents will have as much access to the Obama center parcels remains a question.

Julie Samuels, founder of the Chicago Community Gardens Association, said the concept sounds good, but she wonders if "community garden" is the right term to describe the Obama center's plan.

"Unless you bring people together from the very beginning and they all discuss what they want and what they need, then the organization will not be a healthy one," she said. "(A community garden) can't have a boss."

Van Valkenburgh said he plans to travel to Chicago later this summer to study options.

"I have thought far enough ahead that I know we need to know the answer to that," he said. "You always learn so much about issues when you do that kind of homework locally."

Two more public meetings will be held to discuss the future of Jackson Park: 10 a.m. Saturday at Hyde Park High School; and 6 p.m. Tuesday during a ward meeting that Ald. Leslie Hairston, 5th, will hold at La Rabida Children's Hospital.